Technology: Excuse me captain, is this your oil spill?

By the end of 1995, if an oil spill of unknown origin washes up on a beach, or a gallery is accused of selling counterfeit prints, a heavy isotope of hydrogen could help to prove their origins. Isotag, a company based in Houston, Texas, has developed a system of chemical tagging based on the isotope deuterium, which it says will provide billions of markers that will uniquely identify virtually any liquid or gas.

'Our tags work like indelible bar codes to mark anything from petrol to printers' ink, butane to butter, in an absolutely safe, stable way,' says Manny Gonzalez, the engineer who is Isotag's vice-president.

To label a tanker load of crude oil, Isotag and the oil company would agree that one of the thousands of constituents of the oil would be tagged. Isotag would manufacture a few litres of a version of that compound in which some of ...

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